Road hard
and long. Travel to Guatemala.
Except for the stop at a restaurant for an overpriced and mediocre breakfast buffet. I took a tourist agency bus, mostly because I didn’t want to navigate the border crossing on my own.
So, I took the bus, and the bus takes me. I started to feel like a cow, getting milked for a few pesos at every stop.
Not a lot of money involved, just irritating.
The fun starts at the “frontera”. The road ends. And you get on a boat.
It’s a 35 minute trip by boat to the landing in Guatemala. Kind of nice. The river was moving very fast, with lots of eddys and whirlpools.
But the driver knew what he was doing, probably a thousand times on the same trip.
We get to the landing and the first people to greet us are the money changers. Got to go from pesos to quetzals. Welcome to Guatemala.
Then through immigration, where they charge a $5 entrance fee. There really is no fee to enter the country, but, you’re in the middle of nowhere, don’t know Spanish, are hot and tired, so, you pay.
And then you get on the road. And the road gets on you. 100kms of bad road.
Not the worst road I’ve ever been on, but it seemed to take forever.
But a good payoff. I’m at a hotel, the Posada del Cerro,next to a nature preserve and on a very large lake, Lake Peten Itza. The hotel has a pier for swimming.
I’ve never spent the night in a jungle before. It’s getting dark now and the sounds are incredible.
Tomorrow is a sleep in (if the Howler monkeys let me) and rest day. I’m very tired.